ABSTRACT
An alternative theory that adopts a far less
abstract approach than the previous one is
the ‘restructuring’ theory. The ‘restructuring’
refers to the restructuring of organisations
in response to changing economic
conditions. This approach was primarily
developed by two geographers, Doreen
Massey and Richard Meagan, in the late
1970s and was refined during the early
1980s in publications such as The Anatomy
of Job Loss: The How, Why and Where of
Employment Decline (Massey and Meegan
1982) and Spatial Divisions of Labour
(Massey 1984). Massey and Meegan noted
that spatial unevenness in rates of
employment and unemployment had come
to characterise the UK economy. This, they
argued, was the result of the spatial
restructuring decisions undertaken by
companies and organisations. Companies
were able to use space – differences in
labour costs across space, for example – to
their advantage. Restructuring was
organised around exploiting these spatial
variations in an attempt to maintain profits
in the face of an increasingly competitive
world economy. Patterns of uneven national
became spatially dispersed. This was able to
explain the emergence of the South East
region of the UK as an area with a high
concentration of headquarters and
command and control functions while older
industrial regions became the sites of
routine production in plants controlled and
owned elsewhere. Massey and Meegan
looked at the increasing mobility of capital
and the increased salience of the social
rather than the natural characteristics of
areas.
